Which drivers are required for each type of chipset and operating system

Which wireless cards are known to work with the aircrack-ng suite

Determine the chipset

There are two manufacturers involved with wireless cards. The first is the brand of the card itself. Examples of card manufacturers are Netgear, Ubiquiti , Linksys and D-Link. There are many, many manufacturers beyond the examples give here.

The second manufacturer is who makes the wireless chipset within the card. This is the most important company to know. Unfortunately, it is sometimes the hardest to determine. This is because card manufacturers generally don't want to reveal what they use inside their card. However, for our purposes, it is critical to know the wireless chipset manufacturer. Knowing the wireless chipset manufacturer allows you to determine which operating systems are supported, software drivers you need and what limitations are associated with them. The compatibility section describes the operating systems supported and limitations by chipset.

You first need to determine what wireless chipset your card uses. This can be done by one or more of these techniques:

Search the internet for “<your card model> chipset” or “<your card model> linux”. Quite often you can find references to what chipset your card uses and/or other people's experiences.

YES (PCI and CardBus only: driver patching required) NOTE: Prism2/3 does not support shared key authentication and the fragmentation attack. There is a critical bug and this chipset is not currently recommended. It may even affect other kernel versions. Also you must use old kernel ⇐2.6.20
USB: Only old kernel ⇐2.6.20 with linux-wlan-ng

Determine the driver

Once you have determined the chipset, check the driver section for which software driver you need. Software drivers connect the operating system to the hardware. The drivers are different for each operating system. There are also notes regarding limitations.

If you are deciding on which card to purchase, check the “Which is the best card to buy?” section on this page. There are many considerations that should go into your purchase decision:

Hardware compatibility with your existing equipment.

Price and availability of the card.

Availability of software drivers for your particular operating system and intended use of the software.

How active is development for the software drivers you need.

How much peer support and documentation is available for the card and software drivers.

It is not an easy decision to make. By considering these factors, it will help you make a more informed decision on what to purchase.

Which is the best card to buy ?

Atheros Chipset Comments

One of the best chipsets nowadays is Atheros. It is very well supported under Linux, and also under Windows. The latest madwifi-ng patch makes it possible to inject raw 802.11 packets in either in Managed and Monitor mode at arbitrary b/g speeds.

The madwifi-ng driver is used for the atheros chipsets. This driver does not support any USB atheros devices. However, Atheros acquired Zydas which makes USB chipsets (zd1211 and zd1211b). Atheros has renamed this chipset to AR5007UG. The AR5007UG chipset is NOT supported by the madwifi-ng driver, but it is recommended, because its one of the cheapest chips (about 5, 6$ on eBay) supported by aircrack-ng and offers reliable and stable operation for wireless connectivity. Starting with 2.6.24, AR5007UG(zd1211/zd1211b) can be used with zd1211rw. Madwifi-ng is deprecated and now most supported cards by madwifi-ng should be supported by ath5k or ath9k.

Another USB chipset, AR9170, which covers Atheros and Zydas chipsets (zd1221) also provides aircrack-ng support with a mac80211 driver called carl9170. So does the ath9_htc for USB chips: AR9271 and AR7010.

As of kernel 2.6.26 and later, a new driver has been incorporated named as ath5k. This driver, unlike the madwifi-ng driver which requires HAL and was previously proprietary is a HAL-free based driver. Most popular linux distributions would already have this driver included which should provide support for those using such chipsets and preferrably to try injection patches on this driver before reverting back to the madwifi-ng.

Also, with ath5k comes ath9k, introduced for Atheros 802.11n capable chipsets. The ath5k and ath9k are not compatible as they have different designs.

For more information refer to this page. It contains updated information on upcoming support for other atheros chipsets (except for atheros MIMO).

Broadcom Chipset Comments

Broadcom's “AirForce One” line of chipsets is recently catching up with Atheros in terms of Linux support. The new b43/b43legacy driver in 2.6.24 and up, when patched, can inject at speeds pretty much on par with Atheros. It also handles all attacks nicely, including fragmentation (although the underlying stack, mac80211, requires a patch to inject fragments). Current development versions of the driver can actually reach speeds higher than those possible with Atheros, often up to 700 PPS and over. Multi-VAP operation/concurrent monitor and managed interfaces, similar to the one seen in Madwifi, is also implemented through the underlying mac80211 stack.

Windows, on the other hand, is not supported, except for some older 802.11b-only chipsets.

Like Madwifi, b43 offers no support for Broadcom-based USB devices. For those, a separate driver called rndis_wlan exists, which doesn't support monitor mode (and will never do so, as the chipset has no raw mode). Draft-N devices are also not yet supported.

Users whom use broadcom linux_sta driver (otherwise known as wl) should note that there are no monitor/injection modes with such driver. Broadcom deliberately removed the functionality out of their proprietary binary blob. Read here for more info: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Nov/506. Also b43 supports less than a handful of chipsets, take note on which ones are unsupported and see if yours fall into that category: b43

Intel Chipset Comments

Intel wireless cards are common devices found inside most laptops apart from Broadcom, Atheros, Ralink and Realtek. These devices has native linux support and generally do work well for most parts except for Intel's older chipsets such as ipw2200. 3945 owners are recommended to use iwl3945 as the older driver ipw3945 does not have monitor or injection capability and requires ipwraw-ng and is often not easy to work with ipwraw-ng. Owners of 4965 and later has support with iwlagn.

Intersil/Conexant Chipset Comments

Intersil chipsets were well known back in the old days of wireless identification. The company had open designs and schematics for most of its products along with the source code (firmware remains proprietary but otherwise). These chipsets quickly gained the linux support due to the company's open handed approach until it was purchased by Conexant.

The legacy chipsets, namely Intersil Prism 2, Prism 2.5 and Prism 3 struggle in terms of support as the owners are slowly fading away. The drivers were split between the connecting interfaces on linux platform. Pre prismGT models had the hostap driver for most PCI/PCMCIA cards and wlan-ng for USB devices. These drivers are based on legacy stack and has two main drawbacks:

1) They are buggy in which they would operate, for example wlan-ng does not obey iwconfig commands and requires its tool in order to change the modes, even to turn the device on so that iwconfig will start displaying information from the driver.

2) The injection patches only work on older kernels, so for kernels beyond 2.6.20 will not inject properly. So if one were to continue using legacy chipsets, they must use older kernel, old drivers and firmware or they will not gain the extra features.

As for Intersil/Conexant PrismGT chipsets, the support for these on linux has been making a comeback. Initially the prism54 driver is only able to support fullMAC cards, the support for softMAC cards were all over the place such as the use of islsm. As of kernel 2.6.26, a new driver p54 has been incorporated with plans to merge both fullMAC and softMAC support of Intersil/Conexant PrismGT product range. The initial code was buggy but users with >=2.6.28 kernel will benefit regardless of which PrismGT they own.

Ralink Chipset Comments

Ralink makes some nice b/g chipsets, and has been very cooperative with the open-source community to release GPL drivers. Packet injection is now fully supported under Linux on PCI/CardBus RT2500 cards, and also works on USB RT2570 devices. However, these cards are very temperamental, hard to get working, and have a tendency to work for a while then stop working for no reason. Furthermore, the RT2570 driver (such as that for the chipset inside the Linksys WUSB54Gv4) is currently unusable on big endian systems, such as the PowerPC. Cards with Ralink chipsets should not be your first choice.

There is one exception with regards to the Ralink chipsets. This is the RT73 chipset. There are excellent drivers with high injection rates for the RT73 chipset. Devices with the RT73 chipsets are recommended.

As of kernels >= 2.6.26 there are mac80211 based drivers which should give better support for almost all Ralink chipsets. As for Ralink 802.11n capable devices, they are slowly gaining support, read here.

Realtek RTL8187L Chipset Comments

Cards containing the Realtek RTL8187L chipset work quite well and is recommended. The driver patch for this chipset has been continuously improved and quite good at this point in time. The Alfa AWUS036H is a very popular card with this chipset and it performs well the aircrack-ng suite. This chipset is not to be confused with the RTL8187B, which is nowhere near as tested as RTL8187L.

There are some cheaper models with a similar name (WG511 and DWL-G520+); those cards are not Atheros-based. Also, the Peek driver does not support recent Atheros cards, so you'll have to use CommView WiFi instead.

PCI/MiniPCI/MiniPCI Express

Card name

Type

Chipset

Antenna

Windows
support

Linux
support

Notes

Airlive WT-2000PCI

PCI

RT61

RP-SMA

No

Yes

ASUS WL-138G V2

PCI

Broadcom

RP-SMA

No

Yes

See Note 1 and 2

ASUS WL-138gE

PCI

Broadcom

RP-SMA

No

Yes

See Note 1 and 2

Broadcom BCM94311MCG

Mini-PCI Express

Broadcom

U.fl

No

Yes

Compex WLM54G

Mini-PCI

Atheros

Internal

airodump-ng

Yes

Canyon CN-WF511

PCI

Ralink RT61

RP-SMA

No

Yes

D-Link DWL-G550

PCI

Atheros

RP-SMA

airodump-ng

Yes

D-Link DWA-510

PCI

Ralink RT61

RP-SMA

No

Yes

Linksys WMP54G v4

PCI

Ralink

RP-SMA

No

Yes

Linksys WMP54G-UK v4.1

PCI

Ralink RT61

RP-SMA

No

Yes

Linksys WMP110 RangePlus

PCI

Atheros

RP-SMA

No

Yes

MSI PC54G2

PCI

Ralink

RP-SMA

No

Yes

Netgear WG311T

PCI

Atheros

RP-SMA

airodump-ng

Yes

See Note 3

Netgear WPN311

PCI

Atheros

RP-SMA

airodump-ng

Yes

Thinkpad 11a/b/g

Mini-PCI
Express

Atheros

U.fl

Unconfirmed
but likely

Yes

See Note 4

Ubiquiti SR71-E

PC Express

Atheros

MMCX

airodump-ng

Yes

Also SR71-E/X/C work

TP-Link TL-WN650G

PCI

Atheros

Soldered-in

airodump-ng

Yes

See Note 5

TP-Link TL-WN651G

PCI

Atheros

RP-SMA

airodump-ng

Yes

Trendnet
TEW-443PI A1 1R

PCI

Atheros

RP-SMA

airodump-ng

Yes

Note:

There is an earlier version of these cards called “WL-138g”, which is Marvell-based and thus unsupported.

2.6.25.1 or newer kernel is required if you want to use this card with b43.

Zaurus Compatible Card

ExpressCard to PCMCIA/Cardbus Adapters

New laptops now normally come with ExpressCard slots. The current problem is that there are not a lot of ExpressCard wireless cards which are compatible with the aircrack-ng suite. However, ExpressCard to PCMCIA/Cardbus adapters have appeared in the market.

The question has always been “Will these adapters work correctly with the aircrack-ng suite”. Read this thread and this thread for the details.

If you try any adapters, please post your findings (good or bad) to the forum. This is very important so that everyone can benefit from the experiences of others.

Here is a list of adapters that people have reported as working successfully: